History of the M.E. Church, Vol. IV - Media Sabda Org

HISTORY OF THE
METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH
By Abel Stevens
CHAPTER XIV
ACTUAL AND PROSPECTIVE RESULTS: 1820
Statistical Results of the Period -- Comparative Statistics -- Subsequent Results -- Aggregate
Statistics of the different Methodist bodies of the United States -- Relative Importance of Methodism
in Modern Protestantism -- The Problem of its Success
We may well pause again, before recording the concluding facts of these pages, to consider the
actual and prospective results, and the causes of the extraordinary, the almost incredible, success
which we have been contemplating, and especially to view it in its more legitimate form as presented
by the aggregate results of the various Methodist bodies which have sprung from the parent Church.
The statistical exhibit of Methodism in 1820 astonished not only the Church, but the country. It
was evident that a great religious power had, after little more than half a century, been permanently
established in the nation, not only with a practical system and auxiliary agencies of unparalleled
efficiency, but sustained and propelled forward by hosts of the common people, the best bone and
sinew of the Republic -- and that all other religious denominations, however antecedent, were
thereafter to take second rank to it, numerically at least, a fact of which Methodists themselves could
not fail to be vividly conscious, and which might have critical effect on that humble devotion to
religious life and work which had made them thus far successful. Their leaders saw the peril, and
incessantly admonished them to "rejoice with trembling." The aggregate returns show that there were
[1]
now 273,858 members in the Church, with between nine and ten hundred itinerant preachers. In
the sixteen years of the period there was a gain of no less than 158,447 members, and of more than
500 preachers. In the twenty years of the century the increase was 208,964 members, and 617
preachers; the former had much more than quadrupled, and the latter much more than trebled.
The first native American Methodist preacher was still alive, and was to see both this large
membership and its ministry more than doubled.
The comparative statistics of Methodism (if they may be given without the appearance of
invidiousness) showed its peculiar energy; its communicants already lacked but about 13,000 to be
equal to those of it elder sister, the Regular Baptist Church, which dates its American origin more
than a century and a quarter before it, and, in one decade later, they were to be nearly a hundred
thousand in advance of them. They were already much more than double the number of those of the
[2]
Presbyterian Church, and more than eleven times those of the Protestant Episcopal Church. In a
few years more Methodism was to advance to the front of the Protestantism of the new world, and
thenceforward, for good or evil, lead its van with continually increasing ascendency. It had advanced,
by this year, to the front of the Methodist world, with a majority of 1,700 over the parent British
denomination.